The social network that acts as an online home to more than 500 million people intends to do a better job of letting them communicate with one another in the future.  This afternoon, Facebook mentioned some ways in which it’s improved its Chat feature and promised that further upgrades are on the way.

Without getting into any technical details, Rodrigo Schmidt, a software engineer, wrote on the Facebook Blog, "[I]n the past couple of weeks, we’ve already made Chat faster and more stable, fixed bugs and improved the technology on which it runs."

Schmidt also wrote, "[W]e will be making important improvements in the way connections are established and messages are sent, so that Chat will be much more stable for you and your friends."

Most Facebook users should welcome these changes.  The problems with Facebook Chat have always been annoying, and have often been embarrassing in a they-should-have-fixed-this-by-now sense.

The few people who might not appreciate the upgrades are Internet Explorer 6 fans (if there is such a species).  IE6 support will be discontinued on September 15th because the browser won’t be able to handle the changes.

That shouldn’t represent any sort of major problem, though, and may in fact turn out to be a detail tech-savvy individuals applaud.